New Delhi, 17th July (IANS): Assuring steps have been taken to weed out sub-standard institutes, the government on Monday said that a large number of teacher training colleges had failed to provide details of their infrastructure and other things.

"Several steps are being taken to ensure that sub-standard institutes are identified and suitably dealt with. Towards this end, one of the initiatives involves a rigorous accreditation and ranking process called TeachR," Minister of State for HRD Upendra Kushwaha said. The information was contained in his written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.

The exercise to seek details was part of the Ministry for Human Resource Development (HRD) effort to identify sub-standard institutes and suitably deal with them.

Kushwaha said teacher education institutes granted recognition by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) for various courses were asked by the council to provide details on infrastructure, human resource, and other facilities available with them as mandatory disclosure through an affidavit.

"A good number of such institutes failed to respond in spite of advertisements in the national media and requests through bulk SMSes and emails. The last date for submission of affidavit was December 12, 2016," Kushwaha said.

"Thereafter, they were asked to file responses to a show-cause notice by May 8. As a result, as many as 8,416 affidavits and 3,058 replies to the notice were received," he said.

The Minister said the institutes have now been asked to file details and also register for accreditation by July 31.

The NCTE has signed a memorandum of understanding with Quality Council of India to assist the NCTE in verifying the claims made by these institutes, deploy video vans that will make one-hour video footage on faculty taking up actual teaching work and 10-minute video clippings of student teachers taking up teaching and conducting proctored test for sample of students in each institute.

On the basis of details of this verification and videos, expert teacher educators at the NCTE will assign marks to each institute.